We live in a sea of information, as Britannica’s Web 2.0 Forum has made plain. Sometimes that sea is full of algal blooms. Sometimes there’s raw sewage floating on it. Sometimes that sea is so choppy that it’s dangerous to enter. In a time of educational crisis, when reading and analysis are fading skills, teaching students how to recognize the condition of the waters seems an ever more difficult task. Yet, for all the doomsaying of some observers, including some of my fellow conferees here, I prefer to be optimistic, to think that with a little coaching we all have in us the makings of champion freestyle surfers on that great ocean of data, knowing just where to look for tasty waves and a cool buzz, to quote the immortal Jeff Spicoli, and knowing too just where the riptides are.

Here are some strategies.

1. Trust not the first answer the search engine turns up. In the spirit of the tyranny of the majority, it will usually be wrong or, if not outright wrong, not the answer you really need. A while back, Inside Higher Ed reported that, even though most teachers take it as a matter of faith, rhetorically if nothing else, that finding and filtering information are important skills, too few students know even to go beyond the first couple of hits that come back from a Google search. Less than 1 percent move to page 2 and beyond of the search results. Be one of that exalted few.

2. Interrogate your sources as Detective Sergeant Joe Friday would interrogate a hippie. What qualifies one source to claim superiority over another? How do you know that what you’re reading or hearing is correct? And interrogate the facts themselves, relentlessly. Spend a portion of each day asking, Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I don’t know, but I do know this: In 1960 humans consumed 6 billion chickens. This year the number will be around 45 billion. And since the 1930s chickens have doubled in weight while eating half as much feed. This has implications. Think chemicals.

3. Facts are stupid things, as Ronald Reagan said, until we give them meaning. As the great poet, classical scholar, and musician Ed Sanders urges, Sing into your data clusters, rearrange them, make sense of them as you will, interpret, hypothesize, speculate—but only so far as the facts will allow. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll know when you’ve hit the breaking point. “The goal is clarity / and to find those unforeseen / illuminations and connections / such as to help give birth / to your best work.”

4. When evaluating the statements of others who mean for you to take them as facts, look for the passive voice. When someone says, “Mistakes were made,” set your antennae on the most sensitive tuning. As General Phil Sheridan said of General Nelson Miles, during the Apache Wars, “General Miles cannot tell the truth; he will lie and he’s lying to you now.” Anyone who thinks he or she can lie to you will. This includes whole branches of industry, commerce, and government. All rely on the unattributed, the action without agency, and other species of what a careful reader or listener will find to be implausible undeniability.

5. As a corollary, beware the anonymous. Al Neuharth, the publisher of USA Today, once remarked, “Most anonymous sources tell more than they know. Reporters who are allowed to use such sources sometimes write more than they hear. Editors too often let them get away with it. Result: Fiction gets mixed with fact.”

Who is the author of that page you’ve just Googled up? If you don’t know, if you don’t have an idea of his or her credentials, find another source.

6. Rigorously practice the principle of symmetrical skepticism. Assume goodwill, but also assume that everything people tell you is wrong until you have looked it up for yourself, no matter how much you may agree with your source of information politically, religiously, culturally, or otherwise. Stand with Inspector Clouseau, who averred, “I suspect everyone.” As the old journalistic saw has it, and as I wrote in my previous posting in this forum, If your mother says she loves you, get it verified from two independent sources.

Put another way, consider these words by computer scientist Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers of the Artificial Intelligence that makes things like Google possible: “You have to think about . . . your mind as a resource to conserve, and if you fill it up with infantile garbage it might cost you something later. There might be right theories that you will be unable to understand five years later because you have so many misconceptions. You have to form the habit of not wanting to have been right for very long. . . . You can read what your contemporaries think, but you should remember they are ignorant savages.” And that was decades before Wikipedia.

7. If you’re excited by a piece of news or a press release or somesuch novelty, wait a few days before you commit yourself to it. Mistakes are made. Corrections are issued.

8. Have a little fun while you’re doing all this poking around and investigating and challenging. I love being surprised by strange oddments such as this: Hitler‘s army in Russia had more horses than Napoleon‘s did 130 years earlier. Assemble facts such as this and sing your own song into them, and you may get invited to cocktail parties as a brilliant conversationalist. Besides, it’s one of life’s pleasures to get things right.

There’s also great enjoyment to be had in condensing facts to their most essential form, in composing dictums (or dicta, if you prefer) to aid the memory and keep the fact-learning process interesting. Gresham had a law named after him—why not you? Here, by way of example, is the shortest fact I know: fish fart.

9. Be not dogmatic. As the Firesign Theatre rightfully instructed, Everything you know is wrong. Facts are stupid things, but they can entrap the most careful of us. And we are never so certain of ourselves as when we’re incorrect.

10. The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that we all tape this little note to our telephones: “Are you sure?” The message is meant to serve as a reminder to help stem wrongheaded talk, idle gossip, and pointless argument.

For myself, I keep that question affixed above every computer I own, within sight of my phones. It doesn’t prevent me from being wrong, would that it did, but it has spared me a bit of embarrassment from time to time.

And think of how the world might be if we all had that question before us at all times. Are you sure about those WMDs? Are you sure about that yellow cake uranium from Niger? Are you sure there’s no such thing as global warming? The list goes on, and on . . .